Columbus Day, we are told, commemorates a discovery – but of what, exactly?

Not the American continent, upon which human civilisation was already flourishing before any doughty Genoan ever set boot on the Bahamas. Nor was it a new transatlantic route: Columbus was beaten to that particular punch by a Swede, several Vikings and possibly even an Irish priest named Brendan.

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The prospect of losing one’s way loomed large and grim for the early explorers. Not any more. Even though our ovine docility in the face of our GPS devices causes the occasional spot of bother – “The machine knows where it’s going!” yells The Office’s Michael, just before driving into a lake – it’s rare that one finds oneself all that perilously adrift these days. It’s very hard to get lost.

It’s easy to assume that getting lost is a gnat to be twitched off our collective hide: that the prospect of liberation from disorientation is cause for celebration. But what if there are benefits to losing one’s way? To having to question where we are in the world?

What if we’re losing something by no longer getting lost?

From disorientation to seclusion

Researchers worry that our new dependence on digital navigation systems is damaging crucial cognitive capacities. A 2005 study showed that drivers using GPS directions could recall fewer details of their environment than drivers using paper maps. Some didn’t even realise they’d been driving past the same location repeatedly.

We no longer see those worldly navigational cues whose detection was second nature to our forebears. Writer Tristan Gooley suggests that even in cities, the direction of cloud-drift, the flow of pedestrians and the orientation of satellite dishes on buildings can help us to find our way, all while allowing us to be immersed in our surroundings rather than insulated from them. We just have to learn where, and how, to look.

But if we can get lost by mistake, like Columbus did, we can also do it on purpose; we can seek voluntary seclusion rather than succumbing to involuntary disorientation. This amounts to a desire for solitude: the state of being “unfindable”, hidden from others the better to confront oneself.

If GPS interferes with the first kind of “getting lost”, an entire flotilla of digital forces conspires to sink the second. Apple’s Find My Friends app, for instance, enables groups of users to share location-targeted information about store sales, restaurants and social gatherings. More darkly, users can track precisely the location and ETA of what the developers breezily refer to as their “habitually late friend”.

Similar services are offered by helicopter-parenting app Trick or Tracker as well as the more employer-targeted Glympse. Since these services require users to explicitly opt in, then perhaps being tracked when you don’t want to be is your own tough luck. But what if you intend to turn the tracker off after one use, but forget? Does your having agreed to be visible at some point in the past constitute consent to being visible now?

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While the trade-off between privacy and utility for location-based services such as weather apps might be obvious enough, many smartphone users are unaware that their flashlight apps, digital bibles and even fart apps (for it is indeed to such dizzying heights that the internet has ascended) are furiously harvesting location information before broadcasting it to parties and places unknown.

If we’re squeamish about the potentially dehumanising effect of affixing digital transmitters to the flesh of our children and spouses, we should relax, because the jig is already up. The only reason we microchip the family hound is because unlike us, Fido can’t be persuaded to tote a smartphone everywhere he goes.

Digital sabbath

If we want to bid adieu to the the digital circus – to be undiscoverable, if only for a while – all we have to do is kick the smartphone habit. Simple, right? Shame about our spasmodic compulsion not just to devour digital content to the point of nausea and self-loathing, but also to leave a faecal trail of posts, likes and location-tagged check-ins in our wake.

“Digital detox” programmes are too pricey for many. And most of us are too time-impoverished to contemplate a quixotic, hairier-than-thou pilgrimage to the wilderness. But we are not powerless. We could start with Tim Wu’s suggestion of a “digital sabbath” – setting aside one day a week during which to leave our devices at home, read and write on paper materials, and seek out new experiences whose contents we haven’t already prophesied via Yelp.

If you’re an urban dweller, like the majority of modern Americans, you are seldom (if ever) truly alone. Still, being digitally untraceable amid a throng is a distinctively modern and increasingly precious form of solitude in its own right. Perhaps getting deliberately lost is worth celebrating.

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